Newsletter

A diverse and divided city

Savannah City Council in chambers during a recent meeting. Richard Burkhart/Savannah Morning News

Richard Burkhart

Savannah City Council in chambers during a recent meeting. Richard Burkhart/Savannah Morning News

Perhaps it was the sudden, public nature of the realization that made it more shocking.

When the Savannah City Council on Wednesday chose two finalists for city manager, it was a simple case of majority rules.

This time, the majority was the five black members of council. The four white council members were the minority. The council had whittled candidates down to four: Two black males, a white male and a black female.

Mayor Otis Johnson announced the final two were Acting City Manager Rochelle Small-Toney and Alfred Lott, city manager of Albany. The one white candidate, Pat DiGiovanni, a deputy city manager in San Antonio had been eliminated.

For the four white council members, it was more than a question of race. DiGiovanni had scored better in public forums and with employees, and in the initial selection of eight finalists, he and Small-Toney had received the highest approval from the council.

Wednesday, though, not a single black council member was willing to vote for him.

In Johnson's seven years of leadership, the council has prided itself on building consensus and presenting a unified front.

Last week, the unity couldn't withstand the questions.

When Aldermen Larry Stuber, Tony Thomas, Jeff Felser and Alderwoman Mary Ellen Sprague took turns addressing their concerns with the final selection, the mayor said his piece, too.

"It's very interesting," he said. "Now that the white candidate has been eliminated, all of a sudden it's an issue."

That one vote, intentionally or not, laid bare a changing political landscape that few had acknowledged would need navigating. It signaled a shift into another age of Savannah's history, one marked by a city governed by its new black majority. One that will require the former white majority to learn how to operate as a minority. It is a shift that is happening not only in Savannah, but also across the country.

What it signals for Savannah and the rest of the nation, demographers and political scientists say, will be an increasingly diverse - and divided - population that must find new ways of understanding and cooperating with each other.

"It's often difficult for white leaders who have been in authority to discover that they are no longer in authority," said Charles Bullock, the Richard B. Russell professor of political science at the University of Georgia. "Whites are finding themselves in the same position blacks were, and they're realizing if you want to make a difference you have to form a coalition because if everything is going to be divided along racial lines, they're going to find themselves on the losing side."

The new majority, too, must consider a different approach, says Sam Fulwood III, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C., a think tank studying race, diversity and population changes.

If new leadership works from a "turnabout is fair play" standpoint, it will serve only to further entrench racial animosities, he said.

"I think that is the fear and the instinct," he said. "I think that is misguided and dangerous...if it resorts to payback, it's going to delay getting to compromise."

The demographics

It was a slow progression. Savannah's black residents became the majority in the 1990 Census. In 1995, the city elected Floyd Adams Jr. as the city's first black mayor. By the November 1999 elections, council had its first black majority when Edna Jackson, now mayor pro tem, was elected at large and became the fifth black member of council.

Doug Bachtel, a University of Georgia professor specializing in demographics, points to two underlying changes that shift a city's population to majority black.

"White flight" came first after school desegregation. Middle- and upper-income white families left the city, moving onto the islands and west Chatham and later out into Effingham and Bryan counties for better schools. The next exodus is called "bright flight"

and was triggered when upper- and middle-class African-American residents left for the same reasons: Fear of crime and the desire for better schools and newer homes.

"It's the middle class of both races that leave," Bachtel said. "They want the suburban dream and all that stuff."

In Georgia, annexation laws contribute to the shift, Bullock said.

In Texas, for example, as white populations moved out of urban cores, annexation laws allowed cities to expand their boundaries to still include the migrating residents. Georgia's more complicated annexations make it harder for cities to recapture residents who move into the county.

Eventually, Bullock said, gentrification may help restore a closer racial balance as older, retired couples look to move downtown or as more students and young professionals choose to stay.

A new activist

Michael Gaster is choosing to stay, and it has meant leading the way on a new political landscape. He is a resident of the city's second district, and as a white, 30-something professional he is in the city's minority. He ran for state Senate last year and lost, but is continuing to build a political base oriented around issues. His first effort, challenging the police department's jaywalking campaign, forced the city to reverse course and prompted court officials to forgive citations.

He has started Facebook petitions calling for Small-Toney and Johnson to step down. So far, his online supporters are largely white, but he says a vocal, diverse group is the most important factor in affecting change.

He is not focusing on race, but on the actions by city leaders that he views as contrary to good government.

When he assesses how he fits into Savannah's changing politics, there are echoes of the civil rights movement.

"The inherent flaw with democracy," he said, "is that 51 percent can take away the right of 49 percent."

New strategies will be important, he said.

"Hopefully the people on council can sharpen their skills using the legal process," he said. "And perhaps the public can put pressure on them to do what's right.

"A silent minority is not going to get us anywhere."

Common ground

While the population may shift, black and white, urban and suburban are still inextricably linked.

The issue, Bullock says, is that while government may be minority-controlled, the city's economic core remains controlled by white business leadership. The two groups often work together out of the simple recognition they are bound by a mutual interest in keeping that economic core thriving.

"If it withers and dies, it's not going to be good for the rest of Chatham County and the region," Bullock said.

Dr. John W. "Billy" Jamerson III is board chairman of the Ralph Mark Gilbert Civil Rights Museum. Given how well Savannah has historically handled race issues, he calls the current climate "kind of messy and kind of ugly." "It does not need to be divided along racial lines," he said. "Savannah's progress in the civil rights era came because the races were united, not divided."

He credits past city administrators Don Mendonsa, Michael Brown and Henry Moore, a black assistant city manager who oversaw public development, with recognizing the importance of making unity a priority.

The question City Council must ask, he said, is whether a candidate is the absolute best applicant.

"Do we have the next Don Mendonsa?" he asked.

Despite the tension over the current city manager search, Savannah does have a recent example where the community, black and white, united behind one choice. When city and county leaders named Willie Lovett police chief last year, it was recognition of a community belief that he was the most qualified candidate.

Jamerson believes Small-Toney is the ideal choice for the job permanently, but he does not believe the decision should be motivated by a driving ideal to name the city's first black city manager.

"I don't think the color of one's skin is more important than the quality of leadership you bring to the job," he said.

Avoiding pitfalls

Even before a council decision came down to one finalist over another, there were undercurrents of racial tension.

Prior to Small-Toney becoming acting city manager, the discussion in some white sectors was whether Savannah was becoming "too black." The city had a black mayor, black police and fire chiefs and a black district attorney. Where, this new minority wondered, were the faces that looked like them?

That will be a question asked increasingly across America, says Fulwood of the Center for American Progress. By 2050, whites no longer will be a majority.

They will be about 49 percent of the population. African-Americans will be about 13 percent of the population, as will Asians. Latinos will comprise 33 percent of the population.

The instinct, Fulwood said, may be for white groups to form racial coalitions of their own, but his studies indicate that would be a mistake.

The better path is to look for common issues and work across racial lines.

He can't point to a shining example of an American city that has managed to do this easily, but he can point to our history with some hope. The country has had only one notable period where stakeholders cast aside the notion of community above all else, which led to the Civil War.

Clashes over civil rights and the Vietnam War threatened the country, but the nation as a whole worked through those conflicts.